I blame both sides actually.
Rep - greed, sending jobs overseas that lower educated blacks can do, aka factory jobs that pays well.
Dem - paternalistic as long as you vote for us mentality, numbing our desire to actually work.
I don't disagree about the Dems here but the Repubs are just as bad if not worse, they appeal to regular Americans who don't want their handouts at election time, but then they send out just as much in corporate welfare and other tax breaks for America's wealthiest citizens than the Dems ever thought about giving away. The main thing to me is the regular folks who support the Repubs turn a blind eye while the rich get richer and the poor (including them) get poorer and poorer and just don't/won't see what's going on right under their noses. It actually reminds me so much of when slaves on Southern plantations felt like they finally had someone to "look down on" when they talked about "the poor white trash". It didn't exactly help their quality of life did it? Just more mind games.
But I blame Jackson and Sharpton the most and you know why. They only target what they can get out of it and not helping us out. Just wondering when they will address the black on black crime, literally gun shots in the hundreds on weekends alone, but not a word from them. It is a bad word to utter them and black on black violence in the same sentence in a black family outing. We need to fix our own backyard first. Our president isn't doing much, our so called black leaders are not doing much or quite frankly, NOTHING. It is frustrating that people like me are trying to do something, parenting, counseling and teaching younger blacks but it is not enough.
l loathe Jesse and Al too, but IMO you hate them so much because of their ethnic persuasion is the same as yours but that's where the similarity ends and people tend to try and lump them in with you which is silly to say the least but that's how stereotypes work. It's kind of like when Foxworthy tells a "stupid southerner" joke we all laugh, but when a damned Yankmee (like my brother in law) tells one it makes me want to punch him, not that most things don't make me want to punch him.
There is another softball player that is on my team that is black and his son plays as well with us. We make fun of him calling him Willie Mays Hays because he acts just like him. I've watched in him how he parent's his 16-yr old son. I overheard a conversation about handling your responsibility. Not like the movie "Above the Rim" when Tupac order a kid to be shot, but about growing up being a man and get a job. So his dad heard another on our team about a position being open and that is when he said it. His son told me his dad is always there making sure he is not in the bad crowd (kind of tough when the black pop of this city is less than 1.5%). Always in the books, have a summer job, all the right things and he is really cool. What shocks me, he grew up in Mississippi and I was like, wth are you doing way up here? He said wife and job and been here for over 12 years.
OK, are we talking about Willie Mays Hays from Major League I or Major League 2??

We need more black parents to instill responsibility into our youths so we can get rid of the "thug" mentality that is attached to our skin color.